To be young, in love on a summer day
/The Boston Herald
August 24, 1993
Their gift is a year-round commitment
/The Boston Herald
December 14, 1993
What real love is all about
/The Boston Herald
August 1, 1993
Life it too short to wear tight shoes.
/
“Life it too short to wear tight shoes.” That’s all the card said. No kicker line inside. The kicker line “Life it too short to wear tight shoes.” That’s all the card said. No kicker line inside. The kicker line was this immutable truth. So why, despite a lifetime of experience, do I still not want to believe it?
My friend Anne sent the card. A few days prior, I had called her complaining. It was the usual litany: “My feet are killing me. I can’t believe I bought these shoes. They seemed so comfortable in the store. Blah, blah, blah.”
Read MoreDied Friday
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Another person I knew died last week. I opened the paper and there was his face. “Died Friday,” the notice said, the picture of him alive and smiling incongruous next to the words.
He wasn’t a close friend. In fact he wasn’t a friend at all. I never confided in him. I never said, “Let’s have lunch sometime.”
Read MoreThe Down syndrome conversation we should be having
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After YouTuber Jesse Ridgway announced he and his wife terminated a pregnancy because of a Down syndrome diagnosis, I found myself thinking about the love and joy that often go unmentioned.
Read MoreNailing jelly to a tree
/This is a very old column written in 1982 for the Patriot Ledger. I just found it, reread it and it made me laugh. I hope it makes you laugh, too.
It’s been a privilege
/
I am sitting in my office poring over a pile of mail that has come across my desk during the past five years. I have saved all of it, every compliment, every criticism. I've learned from the letters. I've learned what you care about, what makes you angry, what makes you cry.
You sustained me when I thought all the words had been said, when I wondered what gave me the right to be espousing theories, to be telling you about my family and friends.
Read MoreMissing more than just Irish bread this holiday season
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It is nothing and it is everything. A disappointing-when-I-made-it recipe for Irish bread that was my mother’s. Somehow it’s missing. And this is making me crazy. And sad.
My mother baked. My mother enjoyed baking. For a while, when I was seven and eight, she worked at Whitey’s Bakery in Weymouth Landing where she decorated cakes with roses made of frosting. At home, I witnessed how happy she was baking. She hummed while she measured. She sang as she mixed. Maybe that’s why her Irish bread was rich but not heavy. Solid but not dry. Because it was made, not just with raisins and caraway seeds, but also with love.
Read MoreThe Dish
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Its silver is tarnished, if it is silver. Maybe it’s silver plate dulled by the years. I don’t know any more about this serving dish’s pedigree now than I did when I was 15. I know only that my mother loved it. And because she loved it, I saved it. And because I saved it, for a few seconds one week ago, it became more than a dish. It became a time machine.
But first the rabbit:
Read MoreA street sign shows the way
/
The intellect arches its eyebrows, denies it, demeans it. The intellect says, What? Are you serious? The dead do not speak. The dead are dead.
But the intellect is wrong.
I am driving to Bridgewater State University, a sprawling Massachusetts school, which was a small college when I went there. I am meeting my bonus grandson, my youngest daughter’s partner’s son, who is a sophomore majoring in criminal justice. The last time I saw Matt in person, at Christmas, he offered to show me around the now sprawling campus. We made plans to meet at two o’clock in the parking lot near his dorm on the last Friday in January. The morning of our meeting, he texted, “Message me when you get here.”
Read MoreCherish the last like you do the first This moment that always was, won’t always be. This is it. This will not be happening again.
/
I spent an afternoon searching, not for my lost diamond ring, which was my mother’s and which — despite weeks of deep excavation — remains missing, but rather for a column I am sure I wrote sometime, but who knows when? It was one of my favorites, about last times, about how they march right past us, chests inflated, drums banging, banners flying, like a Mardi Gras parade but how, just as often, they creep, too, like a child sneaking down some squeaky stairs to steal a cookie.
Either way, disguised as clowns or spiders, we seldom notice last times. They need some PR. Or at least a viewer warning: Pay attention. Stop what you’re doing and take notice because this kiss, this hug, this handshake, this person standing in your kitchen? This moment that always was, won’t always be. This is it. This will not be happening again.
Read MoreLet's talk turkey!
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At first I thought, Wow. Look at this! I’m being greeted by two, clearly excited to see me, plucked from central casting turkeys clucking at my passenger door.
“Hey, guys!” I said, grabbing my purse and a gift bag holding a bottle of nice chardonnay. I got out of my car at Dedham Plaza and walked smiling toward my feathered friends. “What are you doing in a parking lot? You’ll get yourselves killed. You need to be careful.”
Read MoreChristmas traditions that stand the test of time
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Every year, Christmas is different. Different weather. Different presents under the tree. Different people at the dinner table. Different dinner tables. Different conversations.
And yet every year, Christmas is the same.
Read MoreHow Perry Como left a Christmas song in my heart
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It always begins with Perry Como. That’s what I tell my granddaughter, Charlotte. Until I hear a Perry Como Christmas song, I have no holiday spirit. But once “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” or (“There’s No Place Like) Home for the Holidays” plays on the radio? I’m all jingle bells and holly.
And Charlotte says, “Who’s Perry Como?” And I say “Can you imagine, 60 years from now, someone asking you, “Who is Taylor Swift?”
But of course, she can’t imagine. She is only 16.
Read MoreWe are living in a disconnected world
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The woman wasn’t exactly shouting. But she was loud. Halfway across a room buffered by soft music and full of people who were chatting and laughing and clinking coffee cups, you could hear her anger.
Her internet wasn’t working and she was sick of it, sick of having to log in every day and not getting in! Sick of beginning every morning of her vacation having to deal with this!
Read MoreAnne Frank’s diary introduced me to reality
/
I am about to begin my Anne Frank journal. My friend Maureen bought it for me last year when she and her husband visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. The journal is red and plain, embossed with a shiny outline of the narrow building where Anne Frank hid for 761 days. Its blank pages are lined. It has a pocket in the back, which holds a 4x7-inch black-and-white photo of its young author. It will be my 40th journal. I should have more but I didn’t start keeping them until I was 46.
And yet, Anne Frank is the reason I began to write at all. I was 13 when I first read her diary. Until then, what I knew about World War II was what my mother told me, that my father had fought in it but I was not supposed to talk about it. And what I culled from black and white movies, “Pride of the Marines,” “Mrs. Miniver,” “The Best Years of Our Lives,” which I watched on Sunday afternoons with my mother on a small black-and-white console TV that was the centerpiece of our parlor.
Anne Frank’s diary introduced me to reality.
Read MoreFinding kindness in a world gone mad
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I fell off some machine at the gym the other day. Yes, at the gym. I finally went back. COVID had made me stop. Necessity made me return. I signed up for a few sessions with a trainer who showed me what to do. Then I went back on my own to practice what I’d learned.
That’s when I ended up on the gym floor, arms and legs askew, more embarrassed than hurt.
Read MoreDancing down Memory Lane rouses the power of love
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Chris paved the way. I didn’t know this when he was alive, how one human being would alter us, how one human being would show us a world we might have looked away from had we not known him.
This dawned on me as I sat with my family at the wedding of Chris’s grandnephew a few weeks ago. And this realization has stayed with me, that Chris McLean didn’t change just my family and me. He opened the eyes of everyone who knew him. And then everyone who knew him opened even more eyes.
Read MoreLeaving part of my heart so far away
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I’m in Florida visiting my uncle LeRoy. He’s sleeping as I write this, although it’s nearly 10 a.m. and he is always up and about by 7. But it’s dark as night in his house. And quiet. The air conditioner makes some noise but not much. He has it set to 80 degrees.
There’s no reason for my uncle to be up early. That’s what I think. It’s a Sunday morning so there’s nowhere he has to be. And then I think there’s nowhere he has to be every morning.
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